Columns

There is no question about whether President Obama — along with Secretary of State John Kerry and the editorial pages of many newspapers — has a particular dislike of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But there is another question: Why?
And the answer is due to an important rule of life that too few people are aware of:
Those who do not confront evil resent those who do.
Take the case at hand. The prime minister of Israel is at the forefront of the greatest battle against evil in our time — the battle against violent Muslims. No country other than Israel is...

Regarding Islamic violence — the greatest world evil since Nazism and Communism — the president of the United States, his administration, and the left generally live in a make-believe world, a world of denial. In their world, Islam is today, and has always been, a religion of peace; Muslims are threatened by Islamophobia; Christians are wiped out by “violent extremists;” European cartoonists incite radical Muslims to murder them; fundamentalists of all religions are equally problematic; the hundreds of millions of Muslims who support violent Islamists have nothing to...

On the happily few occasions when callers to my radio show make a particularly foolish comment, I ask them what graduate school they attended.
When they ask why I assume they attended graduate school, I respond, “Only someone who went to graduate school would say something that foolish.”
Because it is never my intention to humiliate a caller, I always hasten to explain that my comment is not directed at the caller; it is directed at our universities. Moreover, I mean it literally. In order to say certain things that are so obviously foolish, one has to be taught them.
A prime...

In his National Prayer Breakfast speech last week, President Barack Obama said:
“And lest we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. … So this is not unique to one group or one religion.”
It is important to analyze these words — because the president of the United States spoke them in a major forum, and because what he said is said by...

In the famous 1997 movie comedy “Liar Liar,” actor Jim Carrey plays a lawyer who, as a result of his young son’s birthday wish being magically fulfilled, cannot tell a lie — he can only tell the truth — for 24 hours. Let’s imagine that such a wish forced President Obama to do the same, not for 24 hours, but only during his State of the Union address.
Here is what he said followed by what he would have said if he could only tell the truth.
President Obama (PO): “Six years ago, nearly 180,000 American troops served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, fewer...

I spent Thanksgiving debating at the Oxford Union.
Oxford University is the most prestigious university in the world. And the Oxford Union, hosting debates since 1823, is the world’s most prestigious stage for competing ideas.
These facts made what transpired all the more depressing.
The proposition debated was: “Hamas is a greater obstacle to peace than Israel.”
When first apprised of the topic, I was so certain that an error had been made that I called both my debating partner, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and Oxford to confirm it. Outside of the Muslim world and the far left,...

Since 9/11, the Western world’s academic, media, political elites have done their best to portray Islam in a favorable light, treating it very differently from all other religions. Criticism of every doctrine, religious or secular, is permitted, often encouraged. But not of Islam. Only positive depictions are allowed.
We’ll start with an example of pro-Islamic bias that is so ubiquitous that no one seems to notice it. Why do Western media — overwhelmingly composed of irreligious people, one might add — always deferentially refer to Muhammad as “the Prophet...

One of the rarest and most important things a pope does is issue encyclicals. In the eight years of Pope Benedict’s papacy, he issued three encyclicals. In the 27 years of Pope John Paul II’s papacy, he issued 14 encyclicals.
Since his ascendancy to the papacy in March 2013, Pope Francis has issued one.
But Pope Francis is about to issue an encyclical to the world’s 5,000 bishops and 400,000 priests that tells us a great deal about him, about Latin America and, most of all, about the influence of what has been the most dynamic religion in the world for the last hundred...

In my fifth and final column on the greatest guide ever devised for a good world — the Ten Commandments — I offer my readers what may well be the best single thing you can do — that you are probably not doing now — to improve the quality of your life, your family’s life and, ultimately, the life of our society.
Many people — even among those who revere the Ten Commandments — do not think that the fourth commandment, the Sabbath Day, is particularly important, let alone binding.
Once you understand it, however, you will recognize how both life-changing...

The Ten Commandments is the most morally influential piece of legislation ever written. To give a good idea of how relevant each of the ten is, take the third commandment, one of the two most misunderstood commandments (the other is “Do not Murder,” which I explained previously).
Is there such a thing as “the worst sin” — one sin that is worse than all others?
In fact, there is.
I am aware that some people differ. They maintain that we can’t declare any sin worse than any other. “To God, a sin is a sin,” is how it’s often expressed. In...